Love Lifted Me: A Song History
"Love Lifted Me" is a gospel song of 1912, with words by James Rowe and music by Howard E. Smith.[1][2] Rowe, born in England in 1865, worked for a government survey office in Dublin before settling in America, where he held railroad and humane-society jobs and began writing hymns around 1896; Hymnary.org credits him with more than 9,000 published hymns, poems and other pieces, sometimes under the pen name James S. Apple.[3] According to the Cyber Hymnal, the two men wrote the song together in Saugatuck, Connecticut, and Rowe's daughter later remembered Smith, whose hands were badly crippled by arthritis, working out the tune at the piano while her father paced and hummed.[4]
Winslow Homer, Saved, 1889, etching. Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The text is a first-person testimony of rescue: a sinner going under in deep water is lifted to safety, imagery that draws on the Gospel account of Peter sinking as he tried to walk to Jesus on the sea.[1][5] Smith's tune, catalogued as SAFETY, is in 7.6.7.6.7.6.7.4 meter with a refrain, and the song has spread through hundreds of hymnals across Baptist, African American and many other traditions, with translations into Spanish, Swahili and other languages.[1][2] Kenny Rogers made it the title track of his 1976 United Artists album Love Lifted Me,[6] in a version that, according to Wikipedia, keeps the hymn's refrain but recasts the verses in secular terms.[5]
For mountain dulcimer players, the song appears among the hymn and gospel standards Stephen Seifert arranged in DAD tuning for his jam-oriented book Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.[7]
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